The Facebook post in the tweet describes the incident as a “Layer 7 Ddos” and promises a statement about the incident “later today”. That statement is yet to materialise, but the site was working at the time of writing. It's service was reportedly throttled, and users in Bitcoin forums report slow response to other requests. Mt.Gox says those queues, which have reached more than 20,000 transactions, can be attributed to limits placed on it by its banks.

Others have devised other theories for the delays, with some hypothesising attacks on Mt.Gox are designed to move the price of Bitcoins in ways that favour the perpetrators.

For its part, Mt.Gox says its recent slow performance is not all due to attacks, with an incident on April 10th be attributed to being a “victim of our own success” as huge numbers of new accounts and high volumes of trades have exceeded the capacity of its systems. The Reg awaits its statement about the DDOS with interest. ®